Back in the machine – opportunity and threats amid much-changed debt markets

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After years in the post-Lehman doldrums, the finance markets are springing back to life. Legal Business assesses the forces powering the upgraded ‘Doomsday machine’

‘Having gathered 100 different [sub-prime-backed bonds], they persuaded the ratings agencies that these weren’t, as they might appear, all exactly the same things. They were another diversified portfolio of assets! This was absurd. The 100 different buildings occupied the same flood plain; in the event of a flood, the ground floors of all of them were equally exposed… The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street, it was a machine that turned lead into gold.’

Michael Lewis, The Big Short

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Great expectations – Neuberger speaks

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Lauded as the outstanding jurist of his generation, Lord Neuberger carried huge weight of expectation on assuming the leadership of the Supreme Court. Eighteen months in, Legal Business caught up with the UK’s most high-profile judge

Given that the Bar has remained in mourning for the golden generation of the Bingham-era House of Lords, viewed by many advocates and academics as the UK’s finest post-War judicial line-up, Lord David Neuberger had a lot to live up to.

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Global London – Sweeping the board

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Our 12th annual Legal Business Global London survey reveals the pressure a mounting US offensive is putting on City stalwarts. Can the UK firms resist the advance?

Maurice Allen, co-managing partner of Ropes & Gray’s London office, knows all about the major players in the City, having taken in Clifford Chance (CC), White & Case and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer during his career. ‘All US firms are doing extremely well,’ he says. ‘A number of firms made significant investments – they’re hiring because the market is playing very nicely to the US firms.’ A biased view perhaps but one that is backed up by the data in this year’s Global London survey: overall headcount of the 50 largest global firms in the UK is up by 6% on the previous year to 4,624 from 4,382.

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Global London – Top 50

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The firms that appear in Global London are the 50 largest non-UK originated firms in London, ranked by headcount. Partner and lawyer numbers were all requested as full-time equivalents as of 1 January 2014. All partner hires were up to and including February 2014. Total lawyer numbers include partners, associates, assistants and trainees but not paralegals. The US Internal Revenue Service average exchange rate for the year 2013 was used for Global London calculations. This was $1=£0.665.

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Global London – The justice play

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Having for years eschewed the City disputes market to invest in corporate and banking work, US firms have been piling into litigation of late

In retrospect, it seems strange that it wasn’t part of the game plan from the very start. US law firms – so long geared as much towards disputes as transactional work – came to London in force well over a decade ago… and all but ignored litigation.

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Global London – Part of the game

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It’s been a challenging period for European firms, but a growing band of players see a substantive City presence as core to their future prospects

Top-tier French outfit Gide Loyrette Nouel is the only continental European firm ever to have made our list of the 50 largest foreign firms in London and its fortunes in the Capital in recent years tell the story of many international firms post-Lehman. In 2008, it had 45 lawyers in the City. By 2013, this had fallen to 34. This is against a backdrop of poor financial performance in recent years, with turnover dropping 30% from £7.8m to £5.5m in the 2011/12 financial year, alongside a gross profit drop of 63% from £3.8m to £1.4m.

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Ask no quarter – getting ringside at the epic smartphone battles

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As the increasingly aggressive global patent wars between smartphone and tablet manufacturers continue to rage on, Legal Business asks leading IP practices what would happen if the final bell rang tomorrow

In November 2013, while acting for Apple in one of its seemingly never-ending patent battles with Samsung, Morrison & Foerster’s trial lawyer Harold McElhinny made his closing argument to the jury, which said: ‘When I was young I used to watch television on televisions that were manufactured in the United States: Magnavox, Motorola, RCA. These were real companies. They were well known and they were famous. They were creators. They were inventors. They were like the Apple and Google today.

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You’re gonna need a bigger boat! – big data and the modern law firm

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Big data has been hailed as the next big thing to hit legal tech and has already become a force in US litigation. Legal Business assesses the prospects for the analytics-powered law firm

In 2011, McKinsey defined big data as ‘datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyse’ and hailed big data analytics – applying algorithms to crunch together numbers from disparate sources to uncover new correlations, patterns and trends – as ‘the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity’.

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Taking Manhattan – can the Wall Street elite hold out in the age of the $5bn law firm?

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As the banking crisis and collapse of Dewey fade from memory, a band of emerging giants continue their long-term push into the once impenetrable New York market. Legal Business asks if the Wall Street elite can hold out

January 2014 marked the 100th ‘birthday’ of ‘Mother Merrill’, the affectionate nickname given to New York finance house Merrill Lynch thanks to its reputation for training and taking care of its staff. That name had particular significance for Wall Street lawyers, in view of the avalanche of work the institution bestowed on its favoured local law firms.

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